The Secret Diaries of Hellboy

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The Secret Diaries of Hellboy

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In a year__ that'll see no fewer than five comic books turned into movies, the one that's got fanboys most amped is Hellboy - an adaptation of the indie graphic novel about a beast from Hades with a heart of gold. Why the high hopes? The film is the result of a six-year collaboration between Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and director Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Blade II), who worked hard to capture the comic's spirit. In anticipation of the flick's April 2 premiere, Wired got the pair to sketch out how they brought the supernatural action hero to life.

WIRED: What's taken so long to get this comic on the big screen?MIGNOLA:Hellboy is not an easy sell. It isn't quite a horror movie. It's not a straight action movie. It's not a conventional superhero movie.DEL TORO: The closest I've come to the 50-word description is: He's 6'5", red, has a tail, and is a regular Joe. That doesn't exactly light the fire of a studio. Mike combined cult detectives, Doc Savage novels, horror literature, gothic literature, and superhero folklore - all that makes for a very difficult, quick sale. In the first four years of life of this project, people would ask the wrong questions: Does he have to be red? Does he have to have horns? We had an executive say, "Couldn't it be a regular guy who gets angry and turns into Hellboy?" All that kind of bullshit.

But Hollywood seems to love making comics into movies.DEL TORO: When we started, The Matrix wasn't even a gleam on the horizon. We had the screenplay made, the draft completed, and X-Men was not there, Spider-Man was not there. Nothing was there. We were basically trying to convince the studio that comic books were viable. I think the only decent, successful movie made of a comic book in those days was Blade.MIGNOLA: And like Blade, you have to remember, Hellboy is a comic property that most people had never heard of. It's similar to Men in Black, which nobody knows was a comic book.

Is Hellboy the movie just like Hellboy the comic?DEL TORO: The movie starts exactly like a Mike Mignola comic. Then it has a section that is more of an urban environment. The last third of the movie is once again a fully Mignola universe with cemeteries, crumbling catacombs, et cetera. The movie is a riff. It's like having your favorite Frank Sinatra song sung by Tom Waits.

How did you stay true to the comic's spirit?DEL TORO: Before we started shooting, I generated a memo that was 12 pages long (see opposite page). I wrote a mini essay of what makes the comic the comic. What is the color palette? What are the architectural shapes? What is the style of the fighting? I sent this memo to every single department and every actor. I wanted them to know the rules of the game.

MIGNOLA: I was so impressed that so much homework had gone into it. In other comic book films out there, the director tries to imitate some of the tricks of a comic - like panels or sound effects - comic-bookish things that are just scratching the surface. Guillermo went inside the comic, past the fact that people speak in balloons, which is just crap, which is just what we do to tell a story. It's like saying, I'm going to study painting, and then fixating on the frame. Guillermo took the visual cues from the artwork, but not the gimmicks and tricks of how you tell a story in comics.